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A review by lpm100
Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues by Martin J. Blaser
5.0
Book Review
5/5 stars
Missing Microbes
"Exposition of the concept of the microbiome"
*******
This book has a lot of overlap with things that I've read before, and it's not really news that overuse of antibiotics is causing a lot of problems.
It's just that this book keeps track of what a lot of them are.
This book was written probably 22 years after Laurie Garrett's "The Coming Plague."
What this book adds that that one does not have (in spite of the fact that his writing is not as good as hers) is to help reiterate the concept of the microbiome.
This is a slowly burgeoning field of study (I think that the author says that people have been aware of this even as far back as 1963), but a bit of repetition never hurts to help popularize such an idea.
After all, it took many decades and many books that were written on the same topic to get people to understand that calories are not all of weight gain/loss, and that weight loss can be accomplished through controlling which foods one eats that create the greatest hormonal response. (Fasting; Atkins diet.)
And, since the whole book can be read through in about 4 hours (two days worth of reading time), that makes it such that the knowledge value added to time ratio is high enough for it to be worth it.
A lot of what the author says is speculative, but when one considers the huge number of bacteria in a human being and the huge number of sequences that will need to be done... that is forgivable, and the field will reach its maturity as enough sequencing / statistical research is done.
In reality, I think the reason that people ignore this project is for the precise reason that it is so statistically overwhelming.
Even just to sequence the microbes within one human gut, estimates range that there are between 300 and 1,000 different species. (And they are all estimates, because, Believe it or not, the entire human gut has not been characterized.)
Even assuming that every single bacteria have been isolated (an extremely generous assumption), that would be US$50 million just to sequence *those* bacteria.
Of the book:
-218 pages of light prose
-16 chapters
-13.6 pps/ chapter
-36 pages of references, which are actually less than meet the eye because of the way that the sources are structured.
Each chapter in one sentence:
1. The eradication of childhood/other diseases of one type has led to a series of other problems (obesity, juvenile diabetes, asthma, etc).
2. Bacteria have been here much longer than all other mammals, and there's somewhere between 20 million and 1 billion different types.
3. Bacterial and fungal cells in / all human beings are over three times greater than the number of human cells, are about 99% of the genetic material on a human, and they have a symbiotic relationship to their human hosts. ("The microbiome.)
4. Up until the event of antibiotics, pathogens kept human populations in check.
5. A brief history of the development of the first antibiotic (penicillin), along with some later antibiotics.
6. A (quantitative) bit about the overuse of antibiotics, and scale of resistance.
7. Most antibiotics produced in the US go to farming purposes, and that creates a bunch of secondary problems with missing microbes.
8. A child gets his microbiome within the first 3 years of life, with the first dose coming as he slides down the vaginal canal. (C-section children have more problems thn would be expected by chance as a result of this lack of contact.)
9. Scientific blind spots, as exemplified with their study of H. pylori. (What you see is not necessarily all there is. What is important may not be something that you see because it is hidden in plain sight.)
10. Amphibiosis is where two organisms learn to live with each other, but it's a little bit less than symbiosis where they have to live with each other. People who don't have h. Pylori trade off one series of consequences (acid reflux) for another (stomach cancer).
11. There is correlational evidence that: Disturbance of the microbiome may cause asthma.
12. There is correlational evidence that: Disturbances of the microbiome may cause differences in height. (It has been too highly variable over periods of time too short to be explained by genetic changes.
13. There is correlational evidence that: Disturbances of the microbiome may account for a lot of obesity, and experimental evidence from mice and observational evidence from humans show that it is so.
14. Anecdotal/correlational evidence that certain diseases have been rising with increasing antibiotic use and speculative mechanism of action.
15. The next plague is waiting to happen, and it's just a matter of when. Not if. (This eerily prescient bit was written before the covid-19 hysteria.)
16. The number of half baked solutions to these problems.
New vocabulary:
Lumen
Amphibiosis
Fecal microbiota transplantation
Summary and conclusions: This is a great book to help make people aware, but statistically only a few people are going to read it.
And, with the nature of feedback mechanisms to the government (which might be the only thing that's big enough to handle this), some type of crisis is going to come and I don't think anybody will be able to stop it.
We'll just have to file this under one of the many problems that some generic society somewhere reaches that are just too complicated for them to solve. (That was a whole book by Joseph Tainter. The Collapse of Complex Civilizations.)
Verdict: recommended.
5/5 stars
Missing Microbes
"Exposition of the concept of the microbiome"
*******
This book has a lot of overlap with things that I've read before, and it's not really news that overuse of antibiotics is causing a lot of problems.
It's just that this book keeps track of what a lot of them are.
This book was written probably 22 years after Laurie Garrett's "The Coming Plague."
What this book adds that that one does not have (in spite of the fact that his writing is not as good as hers) is to help reiterate the concept of the microbiome.
This is a slowly burgeoning field of study (I think that the author says that people have been aware of this even as far back as 1963), but a bit of repetition never hurts to help popularize such an idea.
After all, it took many decades and many books that were written on the same topic to get people to understand that calories are not all of weight gain/loss, and that weight loss can be accomplished through controlling which foods one eats that create the greatest hormonal response. (Fasting; Atkins diet.)
And, since the whole book can be read through in about 4 hours (two days worth of reading time), that makes it such that the knowledge value added to time ratio is high enough for it to be worth it.
A lot of what the author says is speculative, but when one considers the huge number of bacteria in a human being and the huge number of sequences that will need to be done... that is forgivable, and the field will reach its maturity as enough sequencing / statistical research is done.
In reality, I think the reason that people ignore this project is for the precise reason that it is so statistically overwhelming.
Even just to sequence the microbes within one human gut, estimates range that there are between 300 and 1,000 different species. (And they are all estimates, because, Believe it or not, the entire human gut has not been characterized.)
Even assuming that every single bacteria have been isolated (an extremely generous assumption), that would be US$50 million just to sequence *those* bacteria.
Of the book:
-218 pages of light prose
-16 chapters
-13.6 pps/ chapter
-36 pages of references, which are actually less than meet the eye because of the way that the sources are structured.
Each chapter in one sentence:
1. The eradication of childhood/other diseases of one type has led to a series of other problems (obesity, juvenile diabetes, asthma, etc).
2. Bacteria have been here much longer than all other mammals, and there's somewhere between 20 million and 1 billion different types.
3. Bacterial and fungal cells in / all human beings are over three times greater than the number of human cells, are about 99% of the genetic material on a human, and they have a symbiotic relationship to their human hosts. ("The microbiome.)
4. Up until the event of antibiotics, pathogens kept human populations in check.
5. A brief history of the development of the first antibiotic (penicillin), along with some later antibiotics.
6. A (quantitative) bit about the overuse of antibiotics, and scale of resistance.
7. Most antibiotics produced in the US go to farming purposes, and that creates a bunch of secondary problems with missing microbes.
8. A child gets his microbiome within the first 3 years of life, with the first dose coming as he slides down the vaginal canal. (C-section children have more problems thn would be expected by chance as a result of this lack of contact.)
9. Scientific blind spots, as exemplified with their study of H. pylori. (What you see is not necessarily all there is. What is important may not be something that you see because it is hidden in plain sight.)
10. Amphibiosis is where two organisms learn to live with each other, but it's a little bit less than symbiosis where they have to live with each other. People who don't have h. Pylori trade off one series of consequences (acid reflux) for another (stomach cancer).
11. There is correlational evidence that: Disturbance of the microbiome may cause asthma.
12. There is correlational evidence that: Disturbances of the microbiome may cause differences in height. (It has been too highly variable over periods of time too short to be explained by genetic changes.
13. There is correlational evidence that: Disturbances of the microbiome may account for a lot of obesity, and experimental evidence from mice and observational evidence from humans show that it is so.
14. Anecdotal/correlational evidence that certain diseases have been rising with increasing antibiotic use and speculative mechanism of action.
15. The next plague is waiting to happen, and it's just a matter of when. Not if. (This eerily prescient bit was written before the covid-19 hysteria.)
16. The number of half baked solutions to these problems.
New vocabulary:
Lumen
Amphibiosis
Fecal microbiota transplantation
Summary and conclusions: This is a great book to help make people aware, but statistically only a few people are going to read it.
And, with the nature of feedback mechanisms to the government (which might be the only thing that's big enough to handle this), some type of crisis is going to come and I don't think anybody will be able to stop it.
We'll just have to file this under one of the many problems that some generic society somewhere reaches that are just too complicated for them to solve. (That was a whole book by Joseph Tainter. The Collapse of Complex Civilizations.)
Verdict: recommended.